Simply upload a photo (or enter a URL), and the background will be removed, leaving you with background-less image that you can download. I tested on a few different photos and had pretty good success. It's not perfect of course and currently it only works on photos with people, but it's way, way, WAY better than trying to select and remove the background manually!

From my testing, I had the best luck when the photo was nice and crisp and the subject wasn't in shadows. Here are some examples:

A little over a week ago the site “have I been pwned?” website reported a large collection of leaked user information, the biggest single collection they'd seen, had been posted to a popular hacking site. While it turns out that most of that data was a compilation of previous data breaches, the data was now available in a single collection of over 770 million unique email addresses and 21 million unique unencrypted passwords.

To check if your email account was one of the ones leaked, you can go to https://haveibeenpwned.com/ (yes, it's pwned not owned) and enter your email account. If your email was one of the ones they've found in leaked data, the site will tell you and, if you scroll down, it will give you details on where and when the leak occurred. You can then use this information to determine whether you should go and change your passwords on the affected sites or if you've already done so since the breach occurred.

Last fall I was working with a very smiley colleague on a large order when she noticed that I use folders on my web browsers favorites’ toolbar to group similar links. After I showed her how I created the folders we talked about how this might be something worth sharing with our readers.

For those that didn’t know Favorites Toolbars existed, I have to tell you, it’s incredibly convenient to have a few of my go-to favorites at the top of my browser where I can quickly go without having to click on dropdown menus. I found it frustrating when I had so many bookmarks in my toolbar that it became cluttered, which is where using folders to combine similar links can come in to help organize your toolbar. For instance, I drive a lot, so I have a folder with my favorite travel advisory links so that I can quickly see if I should expect any travel delays. I also have a folder with a lot of Google doc links.

I mostly use Google Chrome and Firefox browsers, but you can also do this with Edge.

In Google Chrome, click the Customize and Control button (3 vertical dots) in the upper right hand corner. Hover your cursor over Bookmarks and select Show bookmarks bar. This will add the bookmarks bar if you don’t already have it. If you right-click in the bookmarks bar you will have an option to add a folder. Once you add and name a folder you can drag links into it.

In Firefox, click the menu button (Cheeseburger or 3 vertical lines) in the upper right-hand corner and choose Customize, click the Toolbars button at the bottom of the screen and select Bookmarks Toolbar. Just like with Chrome you can right-click in the bookmarks bar you will have an option to add a folder. Once you add and name a folder you can drag links into it.

I’ve also found that by having a visual of my favorite websites on my bookmarks toolbar I use them way more than I used my bookmarks menu at the top of my browser.

Did you catch Jamie's most recent Digital Byte video? In it, she talks about her 8 favorite tech tools at the moment and how they might help you in your library work. The video is only 6 minutes and covers 8 tools (Slack, Screencast-O-Matic, Noisli, Pixabay, CamScanner, LunaPic, iMovie, and BeFunky).

Are you (or your library's patrons) thinking about making New Year's Resolutions to take training or learn new skills?

Grow with Google

Google has a "Grow with Google" program with free training, tools, and events to help people grow their skills, career or business. Google and the American Library Association are also launching the Libraries Ready to Code website, an online resource for libraries to teach coding and computational thinking to youth.

Recently I heard about a resource for historic newspapers, called Chronicling America. Chronicling America is part of a Library of Congress/National Endowment for the Humanities program to digitize historic newspapers, called the National Digital Newspaper Program. Newspapers dating from 1789-1963 have been digitized and made available at the Chronicling America web site.

The program has been around for quite some time and there are 14 million+ pages (from 2,600+ newspapers) that are available on the web site, from most of the states, including Wisconsin (via the Wisconsin Historical Society). In addition to searching and viewing digitized pages, you can search the U.S. Newspaper Directory to find information on American newspapers from 1690 to the present.

One interesting aspect of the Chronicling America web site is the slide show featuring newspaper pages from 100 years ago today. While most of the newspapers are English language, there are newspapers in Polish, Romanian, German, Lithuanian, as well as other languages.

If you are interested in historic newspapers, Chronicling America is an interesting resource. Also, don't forget we have access to the Archive of Wisconsin Newspapers, which not only provides access to digitized Wisconsin newspapers from the 19th and early 20th centuries, but is also a searchable database of Wisconsin newspapers from 2005 to 90 days ago.

Last year I posted an article about using Grammarly with your internet browser and Windows. Will liked it so much he wrote about it too! So far, I’ve been pretty happy with the free version and have no plans of upgrading to the premium package. However, right about the one year mark from installing Grammarly it stopped working and gave me a message that it needed to be updated. I still don’t know what caused the error, could it be my browser was updated and wasn’t compatible with Grammarly anymore or was it a timeout feature on Grammarly’s part? Anyway, I followed the instructions to update Grammarly in my web browser of choice and it still wouldn’t work, I kept getting the same message. After some trial and error, I discovered I needed to completely uninstall Grammarly from my browser add-ons and re-install it in order for it to start working again. You could also upgrade to the premium version since we wrote about it last year they have added a plagiarism detection feature, which sounds cool, right Will?

According to the free Grammarly, this article is near perfect, only two mistakes that need to be corrected. I'll consider this a win.

This past week all of YouTube went down. The site was only down for about an hour but, by the sounds of the news the next morning, some people called the cops over the outage.

While I don’t think any of you think 911 is the correct place to check to see if a website is down, if you have general internet connectivity but just can’t seem to get to a specific site, there are a number of ways you can check to see if the site is having issues.

Larger sites may have a status webpage and some use Twitter, Facebook or another social media site to post site issues. A number of larger sites will use all of the above to report if there are issues. One method of checking on a site is to try searching for the name of the site/service and “status” to see if it will bring up a status web page or point you to their social media account(s).

There are also a number of websites where you can check that status of a specific webpage. I’m mentioning more than one since, during the YouTube outage, at least one of the sites used to check to see if a site is down had issues due to the sheer volume of people checking to see if YouTube was down.

Downdetector.com https://downdetector.com/ There are buttons on the page for many, many web pages. On each of the buttons is a graph showing the recent problem history and, if you click on the button, you’ll go to a specific page for that site with more information. Instead of entering in the URL, use the company name in the search box to see if that site status is being tracked.

If you work in a LINKcat library you are probably very familiar with the U.S. Census Bureau American FactFinder tool. We use the Geographies/Address option to identify the "legal place of residence" for our patron records; from city, town, village, census tract and municipal wards. This information is critical for the annual reports we provide the State of Wisconsin and also helps our communities provide accurate information about the density of their patron population and geographic use locations for their community reports.

But the U.S. Census Bureau has so much more. One of my sidetracks is also located in the Geography area - Maps & Data. You can map all kinds of data from this point using a variety of data points to produce a multiplicity of results. Learning how to use this will take some time but if you are a map nerd like me you can get very very lost. But there are maps!

I love Wikipedia and probably use it daily to find answers to questions like "How many seasons of the show the Librarians are there?" Yet, as a librarian I feel like I can't fully trust it. Well, guess what? OCLC developed a training program that helps librarians learn to use Wikipedia more effectively and, better yet, trains them to edit Wikipedia entries. The materials were originally developed for a nine-week WebJunction course, and now they are available for all libraries to use.